Putting his horse to a canter, Mr. Jonathan Gay rode through the old gate into the turnpike.  His still indignant look was fixed on the heavy wheelruts ahead, while his handsome though fleshy figure inclined slightly forward in the saddle after a foreign fashion.  Seen close at hand his face, which was impressive at a distance, lost a certain distinction of contour, as though the marks of experience had blurred, rather than accentuated, the original type.  The bones of forehead and nose still showed classic in outline, but in moulding the mouth and chin nature had not adhered closely to the aristocratic structure beneath.  The flesh sagged a little in places; the brow was a trifle too heavy, the jaw a trifle too prominent, the lips under the short dark moustache were a trifle too full.  Yet in spite of this coarseness of finish, his face was well coloured, attractive, and full of generous, if whimsical, humour.  A judge of men would have seen in it proof that Mr. Gay’s character consisted less in a body of organized tendencies than in a procession of impulses.

White with dust the turnpike crawled straight ahead between blood-red clumps of sumach and bramble on which the faint sunlight still shone.  At intervals, where the dripping from over-hanging boughs had worn the road into dangerous hollows, boles of young saplings had been placed cross-wise in a corduroy pattern, and above them clouds of small belated butterflies drifted in the wind like blown yellow rose leaves.  On the right the thin corn shocks looked as if they were sculptured in bronze, and amid them there appeared presently the bent figure of a harvester, outlined in dull blue against a sky of burnt orange.  From the low grounds beside the river a mist floated up, clinging in fleecy shreds to the short grass that grew in and out of the bare stubble.  The aspect of melancholy, which was depressing even in the broad glare of noon, became almost intolerable under the waning light of the afterglow.  Miles of loneliness stretched on either side of the turnpike, which trailed, without fork or bend, into the flat distance beyond the great pine at the bars.

For the twentieth time since he had left the tavern, Mr. Gay, whose habit it was to appear whimsical when he felt despondent, declared to himself that he’d be damned if the game was worth half what the candle was likely to cost him.  Having arrived, without notable misadventure, at the age of thirty, he had already reduced experience to a series of episodes and had embraced the casual less as a pastime than as a philosophy.

“If the worst comes to the worst—­hang it!—­I suppose I may hunt a Molly Cotton-tail,” he grumbled, bringing his horse’s gait down to an amble.  “There ought to be good hounds about, judging from the hang-dog look of the natives.  Why in thunder did the old boy want to bury himself and his heirs forever in this god-forsaken land’s end, and what in the deuce have mother and Aunt Kesiah